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For many fundraisers, the demands of data management can detract from building relationships. Messy data is the primary hurdle for 54% of nonprofits trying to extract actionable donor insights.

Sound like your nonprofit? If so, it's a sign that your current system—whether it’s a patchwork of spreadsheets or an outdated database—is holding your fundraising back.

The most effective way forward is to transfer your supporter information to a new, more robust system. This data migration project is your single best opportunity to clean house, reclaim team time, and gain deeper insights into donor behavior.

This guide explores how to transform your data migration process, enabling you to build a powerful database that works for you, not against you.

1. Assemble Your Migration Team

A data migration should be a cross-departmental effort. After all, your fundraisers understand the nuances of your donor data—who gives when, what campaigns they respond to, and the history of the relationships you've built.

Your ideal data migration team includes a fundraising professional (that's you!), a representative from your programs team who uses the data daily, and your IT lead or a nonprofit technology consultant.

To get started, ensure you:

1. Define each team member’s role. For example, the fundraiser might be the "Data Content Expert," responsible for determining what data is important to move, while the IT lead is in charge of the technical aspects of the migration.

2. Establish a simple communication plan. This will vary, based on the complexity of your project. For some, a dedicated Slack channel or a weekly 15-minute check-in can keep everyone aligned without the need for long meetings.

3. Agree on the primary goal. For example, a fundraising-oriented migration goal might be “to get a single, reliable view of every current donor's giving history to improve our stewardship.” You should also set more granular objectives to track progress, such as the number of files you want migrated by a specific date.

Take your nonprofit’s current priorities into account when finalizing your communication cadence. For instance, you might start meeting every two weeks and ramp up to meeting every other day as your go-live date approaches to preserve team capacity for other initiatives.

2. Decide What Data Actually Matters

While it's tempting to migrate every piece of data, consider this process a strategic “spring cleaning” opportunity. A leaner dataset is easier (and cheaper) to manage, giving your team a fresh start.

Start with a simple "Keep or Discard?" spreadsheet with three columns: Data Type, Keep/Discard, and Reason. Work with your team to audit your current database and make decisions. Here are a few examples of how this might look in your spreadsheet:

• Contact information and giving history. Mark this as Keep—it's the most foundational information in your database.

• Old event attendance. You might decide to discard or summarize event attendance records that are over 10 years old.

• Marketing engagement data (e.g., email opens and website visits). Keep recent marketing data to understand donor interests and tailor future communications. But, you might clean up data older than 3 years if it's no longer relevant to current engagement strategies.

3. Scrub Your Data

Consider your old dataset like a kitchen drawer. When you move, you don't dump the contents into a box—you sort through it and pack only what’s useful.

The same principle applies here. Cleaning your data before migration is far more effective than trying to clean it up afterward in a new, unfamiliar system.

Keep these data hygiene best practices in mind to get started on the cleanup:

• Find and merge duplicates. Use your database’s duplicate-finding tools to identify and merge records for the same person that have been saved twice (like "Jon Smith" and "Jonathan Smith").

• Standardize your formatting. Create a centralized document that defines how data should be formatted (e.g., “Street” not “St.”).

• Append your information. Over time, supporter records can become incomplete or outdated. Before your migration, consider using a data append service to fill in missing phone numbers or email addresses for key donor segments.

Scrubbing your data should be an iterative process that you revisit over time. Depending on the volume of collected data, you might decide to schedule a monthly data maintenance block to clean your records.

4. Map Your Data

Data mapping is the process of creating a clear blueprint that tells your new system exactly where to place every piece of data from your old system. This step is critical for ensuring valuable information, like giving history and contact preferences, doesn't get lost in the move.

The most effective way to get started is with a simple mapping spreadsheet. Create three columns:

• Column A: Old System Field. List the technical name of every data field from your old system.

• Column B: New System Field. List the name of the corresponding field in your new system for your old data.

• Column C: Notes/Action. Use this for special instructions, like "Do Not Migrate" for fields you're discarding, or to note if data needs to be reformatted.

It’s especially important to communicate with your IT team during this phase. Think of it this way: your role as the fundraiser is to be the expert on the "why," defining what each field means and its importance to your strategy. Your IT team's role is to handle the "how," ensuring the data is technically extracted and loaded according to the rules you've set.

5. Run a Small-Scale Test Migration

Before launching your efforts, always test the process with a small pilot. This allows you to catch any potential errors or mapping issues when they're easy to fix, preventing a massive cleanup job after the full migration.

A strong test group should include several types of information, such as:

• A major donor with a complex giving history to ensure every gift, date, and campaign designation transfers accurately.

• A monthly recurring donor that validates that recurring gift subscriptions and their schedules are imported correctly.

• A couple that gives jointly to test mapping for related supporter records.

• A highly engaged volunteer to verify that your non-financial and custom field data migrates successfully.

Perform the migration with just this small batch of data, then have your team manually review each record in the new system to confirm everything came over as expected.You may need to do this multiple times.

6. Validate Your Data and Train Your Team

With your data now in its new home, it’s time to settle in and prepare it for use. This involves a final confirmation that everything arrived safely and a clear plan to empower your team from day one.

Here’s how to wrap up the project and ensure a successful launch:

• Verify with reports and spot-checks. Run key financial reports in both systems to ensure they match perfectly. Then, manually spot-check a handful of your most important or comprehensive records to confirm that crucial details transferred correctly.

• Train your team. Host a hands-on training session focused on the most common tasks your team will perform in the new system, like entering a gift or pulling an appeal list. Be sure to record the session as a resource to refer back to and train future new team members.

• Set your system transition date. Officially schedule a date when your team will stop using the old system entirely, and create a simple support plan for the first few weeks, like designating a point person for questions or hosting daily office hours to explore data management best practices.

Data migration isn't solely about numbers; it's a team effort that demands strong interpersonal skills to succeed. Use people-first change management practices, such as offering ongoing troubleshooting support and maintaining open communication, to ensure adoption and a smooth transition that meets everyone’s expectations.

Data migration may seem like a technical project, but for fundraisers, it's your chance to streamline processes and build a powerful, reliable fundraising engine. Done well, the result isn't just a new database; it's the power to send personalized appeals, steward donors effectively, and spend less time fighting spreadsheets and more time building relationships.